“Dory,” someone was shaking me lightly. “Dory, wake up. We’re nearly there!”

     I sat up, groggy and disoriented, and wondered why everything hurt. And then the cart I was traveling in jounced over a rock, causing my butt to slam down hard onto the bench-type seat. Oh, yeah.

     Now I remembered. 

     It was a testament to how exhausted I was that I could sleep like this at all. But camping in another world, which was what I’d been doing for three weeks, was nerve racking. I’d tried to rest whenever we stopped at night, but jumping at every sound made that difficult, particularly when I didn’t know what most of those sounds were.

     Like that one, I thought, as something between a rusty trumpet and a bullhorn went off, seemingly right in my ear. I jerked and stared around, but saw only the same vista that had met my eyes for the last two days: jagged mountains topped with snow, scraggly trees twisted into wild shapes by the wind, and expansive, pale blue skies. And a castle of golden stone erupting from a snowcapped peak in the distance, high enough to part the clouds.

     Okay, that was new.

     I found myself staring at it as we jounced along, trying to make it seem real to my groggy brain, which stubbornly insisted that it was an illusion. It was too tall, too precarious, and too close to the summit of the mountain, which could have been touched from some of the higher tower rooms. It couldn’t be real.

     There wasn’t even any way up there. No bridge from this mountain, the only one with a road, no trail winding upward, which would have had to be cut at a ridiculous angle anyway. No gates to welcome friends or ramparts to keep out foes.

     Just a golden castle perched improbably high and looking like it might fall off at any moment.

     It wasn’t real.

     Only it was, and I didn’t know how to deal with that.

     And then a shadow fell over us, like a low-lying cloud. It made me look around in confusion some more, wondering what was wrong. And, like somebody being stalked in a slasher movie, to slowly look up.

     Where my eyes encountered an acre’s worth of gleaming scales—almost literally, as they were inches above my nose.

     I froze.

     The creature that the mass of scaley hide belonged to slid by in a sinuous ripple, despite the fact that nothing that big should even be able to get off the ground. It was a brilliant, fire engine red, with the polish on the interlocking plates that covered it so perfect that a manicurist would have wept. They served as a mirror, allowing me to see myself as a tiny, insignificant thing gazing up in awe as the massive belly slowly pulled ahead of us.

     As intimidation moves went, it was God-tier. And it was meant to be, since I hadn’t even heard the thing until it was right on top of us. Of course, I’d been in an exhausted sleep, drooling onto my husband’s shoulder, but neither of my companions had heard it, either.

     And since they were a half dragon and a master vampire, that was . . . impressive.

     It could have sent us tumbling down the mountainside before we knew what was happening, since we’d almost managed to do that for ourselves a couple of dozen times now. The goat trail we’d been traversing was rocky and overgrown and the width of goats. We’d had dirt and rocks frequently cascade into our ride from hugging the cliff too tightly, along with waterfalls spitting at us and animals pausing to peer curiously out of their burrows at us as if wondering what we were doing up here.

     I was starting to wonder that myself.

     I also was wondering which kind of dragon this was, as these mountains were home to two very different varieties. The way it had been explained to me was that it was similar to the Were situation on Earth. Some wolves were merely wolves, just animals and nothing more. And some were Weres, shapeshifters of the human type who could change in an instant.

     Dragons had the same situation, with the animal type carnivorous, wildly destructive, and casually vicious, and the human-type all of that plus intelligent, calculating, and cruel. I wondered which this one was, and if it mattered. Because the animal-type might well decide to eat us, but the human-type might do worse.

     Make that probably would do worse, I thought, noticing the set of my roommate’s shoulders in the seat in front of me.

     Claire was actually my ex-roommate, since I’d recently gotten married and moved out. But I’d lived with her long enough to know that she didn’t scare easily. In fact, she rarely scared at all, facing down things that would make me blanch, and I’d been hunting monsters for five hundred years.

     Yet here we were, with her looking as brittle as I’d ever seen her, with her narrow shoulders clenched and her abundant mop of red curls vibrating with some kind of emotion I couldn’t read. But it wasn’t happy, so neither was I.

     I didn’t want to be dragon food.   

     Louis-Cesare, the aforementioned husband, obviously didn’t either, as he had his hand on his rapier. That was usually pretty intimidating, considering what he could do with it. As a four-hundred-year-old master vamp, he’d had plenty of time to practice.

     Yet I didn’t think it was going to help us much right now.

     But that might, I thought, when Claire suddenly had enough and erupted from her skin, changing in the blink of an eye into a pewter colored dragon with twisted crystal horns and a riotous lavender mane down her back.

     She’d changed while leaping off of our small wagon, leaving us rocking precariously in her wake, and immediately plowed into the giant red creature who’d been buzzing us.

     They went boiling off into the sky, wings flapping, throats screeching and giant maws agape, and I stood up reflexively, as if I was going to do something. And then just stayed there, feeling like a fool and completely outclassed. And unsure who to be more terrified for—her or us.

     “She’ll be all right,” Louis-Cesare said, and strangely, he sounded sure.

     I looked over at my hubby, to see the wind blowing strands of his auburn hair around as he watched the battling duo. “How do you know?”

     The blue eyes narrowed on the latest impossible scene. “Look closer. There is no blood spurting, and both sets of claws are sheathed.”

     I squinted, but the sun was behind the battling duo. “They’re playing?”

     “Perhaps. Or perhaps it is some strange, ritualistic greeting.” He looked as frustrated as I felt. “I am out of my depth here.” 

     I sat back down. That made two of us. And while the sight on the horizon would be one that I’d carry for years, just from the sheer breathtaking awe of it, right now I had other concerns. Namely my sister Dorina, who had been missing for weeks.

     That was why we were here, trying to get her back. But so far, we’d only gotten maybe fifty miles from the portal where we’d come in and half of that uphill. And the rest through a less than forgiving countryside where the trees got grabby and the fey got nasty and even a spring of water where we’d stopped to fill our canteens had had it out for us.

     The water hadn’t been poisonous, but it had made the posse we’d assembled, most of whom were master level vampires, drunk off their asses. Probably courtesy of the herbs that grew by the water source and seemed to have leeched something into it, but the delay had cost us days. As a result, we were almost two weeks into this supposed rescue attempt and no closer to finding Dorina than when we’d started.

     Only for Claire to finally locate a few of her scaley relatives and be informed that the posse wasn’t wanted. We could proceed alone, we were told, just her, Louis-Cesare and I, on foot or as good as considering the state of our nag. Or we could stay the hell out of their territory. Or stay for dinner as the main course, only that part hadn’t been vocalized. But by the way one of them had been looking at Louis-Cesare, as if he’d make a fine Sunday roast, it might as well have been. The rapier had hardly left my husband’s hand for two days, and I didn’t blame him one bit.

     But the fact that we were being let into their territory at all was apparently a minor miracle, and nobody ever gets anywhere arguing with a dragon. So, we’d parked the posse at a village, bought the cart and nag to carry supplies, and headed uphill. I assumed the delay was to give the dragons time to decide what to do with us, but it had heaped bruises onto my bruises, since finding a comfortable spot on the damned bench seat had proven impossible.

     And now what was Claire doing?

     I couldn't tell, other than getting entirely too far away.  Damn it, we'd talked about this!  If I ended up as something's lunch, I was never going to—

     Our horse stopped.

     It frequently did, being geriatric, overweight, and more interested in nibbling the weeds along the roadside than actually getting us anywhere. But this time, it had cause. This time, there was an absolutely massive dragon sitting in the middle of the road, picking its teeth with a sword-sized claw and regarding us narrowly.

     Only, no, it was not sitting in the road, as that would have implied that it could fit. It was actually clinging to the side of the mountain, with great claws gouging huge fissures into the already crumbly stone, and part of one massive thigh and tail blocking the path. Whether that was deliberate or not, I had no idea.

     I had never felt so out of place in all my life.

     After hundreds of years fighting pretty much everything there is to fight, you get cocky. You may not realize it, but you do. Not to the degree of being careless or failing to keep the weapons’ stash up to date, but in an I-can-handle-anything-because-I’ve-seen-it-all kind of way.

     I had not seen this.

     I could not handle this.

     And based on how still Louis-Cesare had suddenly gone, neither could he.

     Claire, this would be a damned good time to get your purple ass back here, I thought fervently.

     In the meantime, I grabbed my backpack off the floorboard and started rooting around in my supposedly well-stocked arsenal for something that might help. And rooted and rooted, while the dragon patiently waited and waited. It didn’t look like it thought it had much to worry about.

     Frankly, that was a compelling argument.  

     I knew a lot of war mages, some of whom made weapons for sale to desperate types like me on the side, but dragon fighting wasn’t on their list of offerings. And even the fearsome Vampire Senate, whose stocks I had been known to raid since becoming a senator, fell short. Magical snare? Sure; that’d hold him for about a second. Potion bomb? Uh huh. Like it was getting through that damned hide. Personal shield? Probably just make me extra crunchy—

     “Excuse me,” someone said.

     “Hang on a sec,” I replied, and pulled out a nifty little portable portal, only where was I going to send him? New York? Assuming the damned thing even worked in Faerie, which I’d been told was highly . . . problematic . . .

     I paused, belatedly realizing who had spoken, and slowly lifted my eyes.

     “You are Claire’s friends?” the dragon asked politely.  

     Only it didn’t sound polite, but not because he was being rude. But because dragon-kind were just extra about everything, and that included their transformed voices. Werewolves on Earth got hoarse and somewhat guttural when they deigned to speak to you in wolf form, but dragon voices made all my skin want to shudder off my bones and lie there in a little heap at my feet, quivering.

     In fact, I wasn’t sure that it wasn’t doing that, right now.

     Louis-Cesare was doing a little better. That auburn mane of his was more red than brown in the dazzling sunlight, and he had the temper to match. Not to mention that master vamps weren’t used to being intimidated. He didn’t like it, but he also wasn’t stupid despite the male model good looks, and knew he’d have to take it.

     But he was damned if he was going to sit there with a lump in his throat.

     “Yes,” he said, his voice a little high. “My wife was Claire’s roommate until recently. We have been guaranteed safe passage—”

     “There are few things guaranteed in Faerie these days,” the dragon said, which managed to make my sore ass clench a bit more.

     Any further and my sphincter was going to swallow my body like a human ouroboros, and I’d pop out of existence all together. Which didn’t sound so bad right now. Really didn’t, I thought, as a neck longer than that of three giraffes suddenly shot out so that the massive head could get in my face.

     And breathe on me.

     Louis-Cesare looked like his butt was doing some clenching, too, but he stayed seated. And managed to keep his hand off his rapier. All of a millimeter off, but still.

     Had to give him credit, I thought, staring up into an eyeball bigger than my head.

     This dragon was solid gold, like a great statue carved out of the purest ore. But the eyes were completely black, without even any white around the rims. Or maybe that was me.

     My vision was starting to get hazy at the edges, so who the hell knew?

     And then, out of nowhere, I laughed. And laughed and laughed and laughed some more, as if I’d never stop. It was probably hysterical, but there was also a note of genuine humor in it, because this wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. This kind of thing didn’t happen.

     And when it did, it was damned funny.

     I guessed the dragon agreed, since after a moment, it huffed out what might have been a laugh, too.    

     The force of it blew my hair all over the place because I usually kept it short but hadn’t had time to get a trim before we left. But I laughed anyway, and then we both laughed together, and then the beast draped the tip of a wing around my shoulders, which had a thick looking barb at the end like a pterodactyl’s. If a pterodactyl’s wings were tipped with six-inch shivs, that is.

     “Claire said you were fearless. Seems she was right,” the creature announced. “I’m her father, and your host for the next little while. Rathen-Den of House Edredd. Rathen in this form, Den in the other, you see?”

     “Enchanté,” Louis-Cesare said, because he has flawless manners. “I am Louis-Cesare de Bourbon, and this is my wife, the Lady Dorina Basarab.”

     “Dory,” I managed to gasp out, and the great head bowed slightly.

     “Yes, I understand that it’s necessary to make a distinction these days,” he said, which would have been cryptic, only I guessed he’d talked to Claire about my ‘sister’ and other half at some point. “Get on.”

     “Get . . . on?” I repeated, confused.

     “Yes, and hurry up. We’ll be late for dinner as it is.”

     Louis-Cesare and I exchanged a look, which thankfully, our host misinterpreted. “Someone will be back for your, er, horse,” he said charitably. And then hunkered down as much as that enormous body could, crouching like a cat and looking at us expectantly.

     I looked back, trying to come up with words that weren’t “Oh, hell, no,” but conveyed the same message. And then Louis-Cesare stood up and started searching around for a hand hold. Because of course he did.

     “What are you doing?” I asked, my voice calm.

     “I don’t know whether you noticed,” he said, while surveying the unbroken, armored surface in front of us. “But there is no bridge to the castle. No road or path other than the one we’re on, which ends just ahead. No way up except by flight.”

     “We don’t get many visitors,” Lord Rathen agreed.

     “And this is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Louis-Cesare added, and actually looked somewhat enthusiastic about the whole thing.

     I just sat there.

     It was a terrible truth that my father had approved our marriage partly because he thought I would be a steadying influence on my new hubby. A dhampir, the often insane cross between a vamp and a human, was going to be the rational one. And the problem was, he’d been mostly right.

     But I didn’t know what else to do, and insulting your host isn’t a great plan when he could crush you like a gnat and probably never even notice.

     I got on. It wasn’t easy, even with the cart giving me a lift and Louis-Cesare, who had given up trying to climb the great hide and used vampire strength to just leap up there, pulling from on top. I’m not normally clumsy, but my body really wasn’t helping me.

     My body was smarter than I was.

     And things did not get better when I finally topped Mount Scaley, and discovered that the back in question was warm and alive, but also huge and broad and slick, with no hand holds except for a great mane of black hair.

     We grabbed hold of that because the alternative was plummeting to our deaths, hoping it was allowed. And I guessed so, since the huge body got up and went loping up the mountainside like it was no big thing, with the massive talons further shredding the narrow road but easily clinging to the rocky slope. Until it abruptly cast itself off of the cliffside, heading straight for the valley floor, where it swerved just before hitting down and skimmed along the tops of the trees, the knife-edged scales sending some severed leaves flying into our faces as we rode what looked like a green wave.

     And then we started back up again.   

     “This doesn’t happen!” I screamed for no reason that I could name, while the great wings strained up a hurricane, and the wind clawed at us like we were barebacking a 747, and the sun shone in our faces so brightly that I could barely see.

     “It does today,” Louis-Cesare said, laughter and disbelief and terror all mingled in his voice, as they were in mine. And then he said it, the absolute bastard, as I should have known he would. “Can we go any faster?”

     And we did.

   
Chapter Two

 

     The castle was even more impressive from the inside, with towering ceilings, huge windows, and walls comprised of massive slabs of honey colored stone. At least, our room was. And it was all I saw because we were dropped off onto our balcony, which was as big as a house and, judging by the claw marks in the floor, regularly used as a landing pad.

     But only after we’d taken the scenic route first.

     Despite his worries about dinner, our host had had no problem buzzing panicked flocks of sheep, soaring with oversized eagles, and looping wildly around the frozen peaks of nearby mountains, all while adhering to Louis-Cesare’s request for speed.

     I was cold and wet, because we’d skimmed over a half-frozen river that cut through a towering ice cave. One of the great wings had dipped into the water and thrown up a glittering wave as we exited back into the sunlight, which had cascaded with rainbows and sparkled like diamonds. And soaked me with freezing water until my teeth chattered.

     I was quickly tiring, because the mane, while huge and warm and securely attached, had been no substitute for a seat belt. My thighs might never recover, despite the fact that there had been nothing for them to clench around, the back being far too broad. But they’d tried anyway, and now my legs felt like rubber.

     But most of all, I was starting to seriously wonder what had possessed me to come here in the first place. Apparently, I’d been playing on easy mode my whole life and hadn’t realized it, with my so-called skills, both natural and hard-won, useless here. It had been all I could do to hold on while I was given a gracious ride to the summit!

     After staggering inside to the oversized bed and face planting, I still felt like I was flying. Or maybe floating, as I could swear that my body didn’t touch the sheets. It was vaguely like being high, with the tingly feeling of blood racing through wide-open veins, as if it was spooked, too.

     I used to wonder what people got out of roller coasters.

     I thought I understood now.

     After a while, I opened my eyes to discover that Louis-Cesare hadn’t joined me. He was still on the balcony, leaning over the squat, bulbous columns of the railing and staring downward. Which, yeah, probably had a great view, but how he could bear to do that now was a mystery.

     I felt like I never wanted to leave solid Earth again. Or solid Faerie. Or whatever.

     I had a bona fide new fear of heights and it had been earned.

     But my partner clearly didn’t feel the same.

     “Do we dress for dinner?” I rasped but didn’t get a response. Probably because several more impossible things had just flown by, and they seemed to be as interested in us as Louis-Cesare was in them. At least, I assumed that was why a leathery wing brushed the balcony railings as it passed.

     It made a fwip, fwip, fwip sound, like someone holding a leafy branch against the spokes of a bicycle. Only it was more like FWIP, FWIP, FWIP, because the creature was huge, and the railing was some type of light-colored granite. And yet was still showing signs of wear.

     But Louis-Cesare never budged. He was clearly enthralled, and I left him to it. I needed to sort out something to wear for dinner before I embarrassed Claire and the choices were limited.

     Although not nearly as much as they once would have been.

     I tossed my duffle bag onto the bed, opened the zip and poked my head into another world.

     Technically it wasn’t a world so much as a closet filled with weapons. But it was kind of appropriate at present, since it was the fey who had taught us how to fold portals back onto themselves, forming a somewhat stable room in metaphysical space. One that you could access from anywhere, simply by carrying around the entrance.

     My duffle was the entrance, and was just big enough for me to squeeze through and then to take a short flight of stairs into the portable arsenal I’d designed for myself.

     It wasn’t much to look at, just a concrete block room with some shelving and some recently installed fluorescents overhead. The fey often had multi-room, semi-palaces in theirs that they could carry around on their backs. Or that their servants could, ready to pitch far more than a tent for their masters at the end of a long day’s ride.

     But I assumed that those took a lot more power than my little baby, and sleeping rough wasn’t something that bothered me. Being in a fight without weapons bothered me, or enough ammo, or first aid gear. So, there were no chaise lounges or four posters in here.

     Instead, it was the armory of my dreams, one that I’d have never even imagined was possible in the bad old days.

     For most of my five hundred and something years, my biggest problem supporting myself as a mercenary had been coming up with the money needed for the tools of my trade. The mages who did piece work did not do it cheap, which was fair. They were selling their magic, a product of their own bodies, and the fact that they made more of it than they needed wasn’t the point.

     They knew their worth, and it was high.

     But now I was a senator, a member of the feared Vampire Senate itself. And the fact that my senator father had arranged that mostly to give his faction an extra vote didn’t matter. I still had the same privileges as everyone else, and that included access to the Senate’s armory.

     And, boy, had I exploited the hell out of that access!

     I looked around in pride at my room full of goodies, and felt their low-grade hum fill me with a sense of genuine peace and serenity. There was nothing like knowing you had the firepower to take out a convoy, and then to blast the hell out of the army that followed it. Hmmm.

     I basked for a moment.

     Of course, how much any of this was going to help in Faerie was debatable, and took the edge off my buzz a little. This place felt like being in a video game where, whenever you levelled up, the bad guys did, too. I’d gotten myself one hell of a new advantage, just in time to go into a world where nobody cared.

     It was infuriating, but I had come loaded for bear anyway. Including purloining some of the Senate’s new, next level stuff that wasn’t even on the market yet. And might never be, since they were trying to keep parity with the Silver Circle, the magical organization of which the War Mage Corps was only a part.

     The Circle had people constantly working on new magic, so we had to as well. There’d been peace between the two groups for centuries, but the Senate was a strong believer in the old saying: Si vis pacem, para bellum—if you want peace, prepare for war. And damn, if they hadn’t prepared.

     I just hoped that some of this was going to help.

     I also hoped that the clothes rack I’d shoved into a corner, behind a couple of grenade launchers, was going to contain something suitable. I unstrapped the weapons, pushed them out of the way, and set about finding us appropriate attire for dining in a castle full of dragons. But like with my arsenal, my wardrobe really wasn’t up to the task.

     Still, we didn’t have all day, so I went with a tux for Louis-Cesare, which would probably work even if nobody knew what it was, since he looked good in anything. And a floor-length, bias cut, amethyst colored evening gown for me. It was a slip type, with spaghetti straps and a plunging neckline, and was mostly unadorned. But I had glittery sandals to match and the straps on the gown, which crisscrossed in back, were set with diamond-like crystals.

     I thought it would work.

     I carried my best guesses back up the stairs and crawled out of the entrance. And for the first time, took a moment to really look around our room. It was frankly gorgeous.

     It was a large semicircle facing the expansive balcony, which completed the circle. It couldn’t really compete with the view, but it tried, with brightly colored cushions and gorgeous tapestries and an inset mosaic of tiny glass tiles above the bed, which must have taken someone years to complete. It showed a bucolic scene, with hills and forests and a crashing waterfall, which I had been in no fit state to appreciate before.

     There was also a mirror, which . . . yeah. Gonna need more than a decent dress to avoid embarrassing Claire. A lot more.

     Thankfully, we hadn’t had to walk through the castle itself, saving me from leaving a first impression with my hair looking like a startled cartoon character’s, my face wind chapped, and my eyes set on boggle. I combed fingers through my startled locks, which helped not at all, as they just sprang back up again. Then grabbed a comb from a pocket of my duffle and forced them into compliance.

     “I found us something to wear,” I called out to Louis-Cesare, who was still sightseeing.

     There was no answer.

     “You want to come get dressed, or what?” I asked.

     “I think . . . you might want to come out here,” he said, sounding a little strangled.

     I went out there, comb still in hand.         

     And all right, if I hadn’t known that we were curiosities before, I did now.

     “Where did they all come from?” I asked, surveying a sky studded with dragons, despite the fact that it had been clear when we flew in.

     “They’re unbelievable, aren’t they?” Louis-Cesare said softly.

     “They’re something,” I said, somewhat at a loss for words.

     Okay, that was a lie. I actually had a lot of words, all of which I swallowed back down because I didn’t know how good their hearing was. I didn’t know a lot of things here, which was a problem when facing down creatures who were that powerful. Magical energy peppered my skin like stinging rain, making me have to work not to flinch even through denim and leather, and they weren’t even trying.

     Guess I should have known, I thought.

     It would take a crap ton of magic just to get those butts into the air.

     But not all of the flying fortresses were scary. There were a couple of gamboling babies above us, which I assumed were the animal kind, because a woman had them on a leash. She was staring at us from an upper balcony that was set back a bit from ours so as not to block the sun, I guessed.

She reminded me of the dragons who had come to meet us, who in human form gave little clue as to their other nature. Except for their size, with all of them being as tall as the fey, meaning that they topped most supermodels in height, and yet were far sturdier. The fey always struck me as sylph-like and vaguely ephemeral, as if the elements had formed bodies for themselves that they could drop at any moment, dusting away into mist or a fluttering of leaves blown on the wind.

But not dragons. They were undeniably real, solid, and even hefty, with this one looking like a Valkyrie warrior. She had a strong, pretty face, long blonde tresses and a diaphanous gown of ombre silk colored to look like a sunrise, with pale yellow fading into pink and then into the softest of blues. It made my lovely evening dress look boring and one-note.

     Better get used to being outclassed in just every freaking area, I thought wryly.

     The amazing gown was fluttering in the wind, while her pets zoomed about like overly rambunctious puppies. One of them spied us and tried to come down to investigate, but she pulled it back easily, despite the fact that Fluffy had to weigh at least five hundred pounds. So, Claire’s people were strong even in human form.

     Something to remember.

     But the dragons who really drew the eye were the ones hovering in the vast expanse beyond the balcony, spread out like colorful balloons. If balloons were full of massive teeth and giant claws and enough muscle to rip us apart like tissue paper. But I couldn’t deny that they were damned impressive, with colors and textures like nothing in our version of nature. And while I’d thought that the coloring on Claire’s dragon form was stunning, pewter and pale lavender were strictly dull things around here, where everyone seemed to be trying to outdo the rest.

     It was hard to say who was winning.

     I spied another red, like the bastard who had buzzed us, only this one had a belly speckled with dark orange, gold, and yellow, like a scaley sunset. There was a mottled one with skin featuring a dozen shades of blue and a purple belly, with a double barb on the end of his tail. There was one with two mismatched tails, one long and thick and one short and stumpy, but his coloring was so breathtaking that you barely noticed: brilliant green with a bright red belly and what looked like red racing stripes up the sides. There was an ethereal looking all white one, with palest blue on her stomach and the same color along the ribs of her wings.

     And those were just the most stunning, with plenty of plainer versions scattered about, if you consider green with purple veining on the wings and gray with brilliant-colored manes to be plain. Still more arrived while we stood there, nosy parkers coming to see the humans like people lining up at a new animal exhibit at the zoo. They weren’t approaching, any more than you’d get too close to a grizzly’s enclosure, but there were dozens of them.

     I was starting to get concerned.

     “Let’s . . . go inside,” I said, because the last thing we needed was an incident. Not that the crowd was threatening . . . exactly . . . but more and more were arriving by the minute, as word spread. And it didn’t look like there was much happening ‘round the old castle today, because everybody was coming to take a peek.

     I saw several perfectly normal-looking men, if overly tall and broad shouldered, dive off of their balconies several stories below and transform in a wink into their alternate forms, to join the growing throng. One looked plain brown from a distance, but his scales sparkled like gold dusted tortoiseshell when he got closer, his formerly loose-fitting clothing now a fancy scarf around the hugely muscled neck.

     The other was even more dashing, with a brilliant yellow belly but a jet-black body. There was yellow on his face, too, slashes of it on the side of each eye, like dramatic makeup or war paint. But it was scales instead, small ones in this case, that made an elaborate pattern amid the larger plates on his face and head.

     All of the dragons had that feature in some form. Rivers of small scales ran between the larger ones that protected areas that needed to be more flexible, like around the eyes and mouth, and at the joints of the great limbs. The bellies, on the other hand, had the biggest, smoothest scales, while the backs were often ridged in two great lines running down to the enormous spikes that often decorated the tails, and could probably be used like flails in battle.

     The way they all fit together was fascinating and beautiful and undeniably real. And unlike the fairytale quality of most other things here, the black and yellow dragon was immediately and violently believable. Immediately because he had come closer than all the rest, and violently because of the scrapes and scratches on the scales of his right shoulder and part of his face.

     Some of the protective armor was missing there, showing bumpy, reptilian skin below in the same color. Something had gotten claws into him and then jerked back, something stronger than I could even imagine. Another dragon, or something worse?

     I didn’t know, but it fascinated me, that these seemingly all-powerful creatures could be hurt. I didn’t know why; I’d briefly gotten a knife into Claire once, when I’d thought she was an intruder in her own home. She’d been away for a while and startled me on her return, and startling a dhampir has consequences.

     Not that it had hurt her much, although it hadn’t done her mood any good. Or mine, once I’d realized that I had a dragon with a sore toe squashed into my hallway. But she’d been little more than a baby at the time, while this one . . .

     Definitely wasn’t.

     He also wasn’t female. Even in their altered state, the males were much more heavily muscled and the scaffolding of their wings was noticeably thicker. The black and yellow’s huge neck was many times broader than a bull’s as it reared over us.

     He was so close now that, if I’d dared to lean over the balcony, I could have touched him. He seemed to have the same idea, because an arm thicker than my whole body abruptly reached out, with talons as black as night on the end of the elongated hand, sparkling like black diamonds. I got a really good look, because one of the twelve-inch-long daggers touched a strand of my hair.

     And that tore it for Louis-Cesare, who had been tensing more and more at my side. His hand went to his rapier, which he didn’t draw, but the creature gave a screech nonetheless, shrill enough to slice through my brain like a cleaver. I staggered back and the dragon wheeled off, still screeching.

     And things immediately went south.

     I didn’t know if the onlookers thought that we’d done something to him, or if he’d simply rendered a verdict that they agreed with. But the tone of the scene abruptly changed. And it wasn’t just me who noticed.

     “Yes,” Louis-Cesare said, taking my arm. “Let’s . . . go inside.”

     Above us, shutters were slamming shut, including the blonde’s, who pulled her pets inside and did something that caused a bunch of heavy wooden screens to clatter down from a recessed area above the balcony. I looked up and saw that we had the same sort of set up, only I didn’t know how to operate it. And I didn’t have time to find out.

     Because they were coming, not all of them, but some of them—more than enough. Louis-Cesare drew his weapon, I started to run for my bag, and neither was likely to help. But it didn’t have to.  

     A new group took that moment to burst onto the scene, and I had no idea who or even what they were. They looked like a cross between dragons and humans, but not in the way that Claire did. She had tell-tale signs in human form of her other lineage, like faint lilac in the hollows of her cheeks and over her eyes that had nothing to do with make-up, but for the most part, you couldn’t tell.

     Not so with these guys.

     They were humanoid, although larger by a good two feet and several hundred pounds, but were covered in the bumpy skin that I’d seen under the black and yellow dragon’s missing scales. They were subdued in coloring, mostly greens and grays with huge, dark eyes. But the biggest difference was the head.

     It was smoother than those of their scaley cousins, without all the intricate crests and ridges. But it was undeniably a dragon head. Which looked exactly as terrifying as you’d expect on a human body.

     They also had tails, stumpy little things, and were riding the animal-type dragons with saddles and bridles as if they were horses. They were small in comparison to their scaley cousins, but there were about a hundred of them. And they had long spear-like weapons that seemed to be electrified, judging by the sparks they let off and the shriek that the black and yellow male gave when several targeted him.

     It was a shock, not a killing blow, but he wheeled away nonetheless, his cries echoing over the mountains. One of the humanoid dragons paused by our railing, his mount snarling and snorting as it fought against the reins. He was wearing a tabard over his scales, like some sort of uniform, and had on leather gauntlets and boots.

     I just stared at him.

     “Stay inside,” he said, his voice harsh and guttural, but clear enough.

     And then we had to jump back as the shutters came rattling down, right in our faces.

     I stayed inside, but through gaps in the lattice I watched the guards, which was what I guessed they were, clearing the area. Most of their larger cousins had already fled, but a small group had decided to be belligerent. And for a moment, I didn’t know who would win.

     Really didn’t, I thought, my fingers tightening on gaps in the lattice as one of the guards got knocked off his mount by a viciously swinging tail, and was only saved when another, situated slightly below, managed to snag him out of the air. Several more were chased off by the bright red dragon with the sunset stomach, and another fell along with his mount when its head was bitten off by the red and green version. Blood spurted onto the clear, cold air, bright as rubies against the pale blue sky, and dragons’ screeches echoed everywhere.

     But the rest of the guards rallied, and circled three of the biggest offenders, shocking the hell out of them with multiple weapons at a time. Causing them to screech and flap and, ultimately, to peel off. The conflict didn’t last long, after that.

     “Come away,” Louis-Cesare said softly.

     But I stayed for another moment, to watch half of the remaining guards clear the skies, and the rest start flooding downward, their mounts’ wings tucked close to their bodies, their faces impassive.

     On the way to retrieve their dead. 

     “I’m beginning to understand why our host came to get us himself,” I said, and then turned and strode inside.